A filmmaker’s take on “War Horse” at The Paramount Theatre

I recently discovered Seattle-based writer and filmmaker Shaun Scott in the January issue of CityArts Magazine. His essay about filming on the beach for his latest project “Pacific Aggression” –and his thoughts on what makes the ideal feature film – was two parts history, one part poetry. He also writes for The Monarch Review and has been making movies since 2008. On Wednesday night we saw the 2011 best play Tony winner War Horse at The Paramount. After the show I exclaimed to Shaun (and Facebook) that it was the coolest play I’d ever seen; he concurred. As a pathologically long-winded historian and brilliant wordsmith, Shaun’s almost more eloquent than me, so I feel privileged that he agreed to put his thoughts in writing for All the World’s a Stage.

The following is a guest post from Shaun.

The first produced sound we heard as theatregoers came while waiting for War Horse to begin: it was the shrill din of ringing mobile devices The Paramount Theatre used as its obligatory reminder that all attendees turn off their cell phones. From that moment forward, I was interested to see just how exactly the show would remove us for a time from a world when “Internet Addiction” is on the verge of being recognized as a clinical disorder by federal law-making bodies.

A play set exactly 100 years in the past—and in the British Isles, at that—has to reach further to grab the audience’s attention, and has added pressure to not let it go. The play’s impeccable production values were nothing short of cinematic in their ability to do just that, as the costuming, stage design, and blocking curated a stroll through time so effectively that the arrival of intermission was jarring and unwanted: suddenly we were back in the 21st century—the last place we wanted to be after worrying for 90 minutes about a farmhouse mortgage, the maturation of an innocent 4-legged animal, and the ways an impending World War One would disrupt the agrarian lifestyle of the main characters.

During that first act and into the second, a well placed scrim—rendered to appear as a strip of paper torn from some dusty history tome, or perhaps from a yellowing newspaper—kept the audience abreast of the time and setting of the dramatic proceedings below it. During a spellbinding battle sequence it transported us right to the front, and was aided throughout by stunning prop work in its portrayal of the era. Piercingly loud pistols and the crackling bulbs of antiquated cameras were convincing enough to make me jump out of my seat in a way I never have when going to see a film, 3D or otherwise. And then there were those horses: massive hunks of wire and cloth animated and presented to perfection as the stars of the show.

Of course, there’s a sense in which stories themselves—narrative structure, the actor’s use of his or her body, language—can be interpreted as technology: devices that help us look at reality, and history in a certain light. As something just short of a finely tuned machine, the play in some places suffers from the unfortunate affliction of presenting, in the latter half of the story, certain themes and characters that weren’t sufficiently developed early. As this was a story about white farmers at the turn of the century who boasted of their family’s storied role in colonizing South Africa, the sentimental incorporation of a black nurse was forced and unconvincing. At the melodramatic and confusing start to the second act, I found myself just wishing the horses would come back and do horse things for us again.

But those moments couldn’t subtract from the triumphant score, spot-on dialogue, and wry, thematic humor abundant in the production as a whole. A moving and recurring musical motif reminds us that, after all, we’ll only be remembered in generations to come for what we have done: whether we as an audience can pull ourselves away from screens to manifest more deeds worthy of remembering and retelling on this earth remains to be seen, but all involved in War Horse should have no cause to ever question their place or importance on this planet. Theirs was a technology of creative triumph.